Cucumber ethics

Last week’s E-coli outbreak in Germany was another interesting case study in the ethics of risk management. A ferocious looking bacteria, thought to be carried by the very food we eat whenever we feel like a healthy option (i.e. salad vegetables) has led to a scare that has plummeted many of Europe’s farmers into severe financial troubles. On the face of it the numbers don’t quite hit home why exactly consumers and regulators across Europe (and especially in Germany) have reacted so strongly: while, sadly, 26 people have died so far from the E-coli outbreak, this number looks negligible in comparison to Germany’s 3,651 fatalities in road accidents annually (in 2010). Banning Spanish cucumbers – sure thing! But touching the fundamental right of Germans to speed without limit on the Autobahn? No way, no one even thinks about that.

Fair enough maybe - food is one of those things that does raise the risk perception more than almost any other. But one of the more curious things about the outbreak was the initial culprit: cucumbers (especially as attention eventually turned to those evil little bean sprouts). But of course it wasn't just any old cucumbers - still less German cucumbers - but Spanish cucumbers that were blamed. In a continuously integrating EU economy, suddenly a poor little vegetable becomes the carrier of nationalistic identities and accusations.

There is something about cucumbers, one has to admit. In the German context, the vegetable has once before been at the centre of a rather black humoured joke just in the wake of the unification in 1989. The German satirical magazine ‘Titanic’ opened with a picture of ‘Zonen-Gabi’ (‘Gabi from the East’) holding up ‘her first banana’: a cucumber, peeled in the style of a banana. This of course was to make fun of the chronic absence of exotic fruits in the East during the time of the wall. The cucumber became an epitome of the split national identity that divided the unifying halves of the country at the time.

Poor cucumbers have also been at the centre of many jokes about the regulatory frenzy of EU bureaucrats in Europe. Allegedly there exist norms that lay out not merely how long, hard and green a cucumber must be but which even stipulate the degree of a cucumber's curvature: at maximum, its arc can be no more than 10 millimetres per 10 centimetre length. Imposed on poor Polish or Czech farmers prior to their countries’ accession to the EU, these regulations made the vegetable a symbol of the hegemonic power of Brussels and the nearly totalitarian zeal of regulating even the smallest little detail. All symbolized by, yes, cucumbers!

How political the innocent vegetable can become was demonstrated nowhere more strongly than in Iraq. According the UK newspaper the Telegraph, a few years ago Al-Qaeda leaders in Anbar province allegedly banned women from buying cucumbers because they considered them to be ‘male’ vegetables, and therefore in violation of religious law. Tomatoes, however, were perfectly fine for women to buy because they were considered female.

Well, if we were to do more research on the cultural history of cucumbers, who knows where we might end up - but Crane and Matten have no intention of jeopardizing the ‘General Audiences’ rating of their blog! Still, who would have thought that the lowly green vegetable could be such a repository of ethical values and a tool for inter-cultural conflict. So next time you're in the supermarket remember to take a second look at those cucumbers. There's so much more to them than meets the eye.


Top photo by Surian Soosay. Reproduced under creative commons licence

Going nuclear?

This weekend is another proof of the absurdities of short-lived international news cycles. While the revolution in Northern Africa/Libya is still ongoing but features rather low on news sites, and academic scandals are forgotten totally - the earthquake plus tsunami in Japan has swept most other stories from the screen.

Fair enough. What we have seen from Japan has been harrowing. Crane & Matten have taught and worked with many Japanese students over the years and our thoughts have been with them in recent days. We hope that they and their families are all fine and wish them our heartfelt best. Let us know how things are going!

One facet of the catastrophe though moves it clearly to a next level of watching some apocalyptic science fiction movie: We are talking about the ongoing news story about the explosion and potential meltdown of so far four nuclear reactors (by the time we write this). The nuclear beast is rearing its ugly head again.

We remember when the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986 many western commentators put much of the blame on the allegation that the Soviets had old technology, they did not run things properly and anyway, it just went to show that communists are not good at anything. Now – this is Japan, one of the high tech capitalist nations of the world. Sure, this was triggered by one of the top 5 earthquakes in history. But in Japan, earthquakes are not what extreme snowstorms are in Britain. The Kobe earthquake which claimed six and a half thousand lives happened just 16 years ago.

The event hits at a time when nuclear power was experiencing a second spring in many industrial countries. As a carbon-free source of energy it seems a good alternative to fossil fuels, which are considered key drivers of climate change. Many countries that have been shying away from nuclear after Chernobyl or the Harrisburg incident in the US are now reconsidering their options. Finland has just built some new reactors, Obama has issued fresh permits for uranium mining in Colorado, even Germany (which ruled it out 10 years ago) is prolonging the life-cycles of its existing plants – just to name a few examples.

While many experts in environmental politics considered the debate on nuclear power dead by the beginning of the last decade, it is amazing to see that it has come back. The disaster unfolding as we speak in Japan elucidates exactly why a rational discourse on nuclear power is so difficult.

The main threats of this technology are consequences which are mostly uncertain or even unknown. In other words, these ‘risks’ – apart from a few accidents we have seen – entail consequences which humans normally will find difficult to imagine, much less to calculate. The speculations on TV by ‘experts’ about what happens to Japan in case this really turns bad clearly demonstrates this. While the probability of nuclear incidents historically has been very low, the potential impact is without boundaries. Geographical boundaries, but also temporal ones: how long will people suffer from the fallouts we have already seen this weekend? Not to think about the worst case scenario...

Nuclear risks are unique. Their probability – from all we know – is rather low and since we have so few incidents, they are hardly calculable (unlike your car insurance, where we have ample data to establish probabilities). At the same time, the potential impact or damage of a nuclear accident tends toward infinity. Thus the normal way of assessing risks is rather difficult: a probability next to zero times a damage next to infinity – what exactly does this risk look like?

It is here where irrationality and ideology often fill a gap in the debate, as rational concepts fail to analyze the problem. This is exacerbated by the problem that nuclear risks are now ‘compared’ to the risks of global warming – which again is a risk that is difficult to calculate. Not much mathematical information exists on how likely the increase in temperature is. And even less information is available on how hard climate change will hit, where, when, who, and which parts of the world. So, finding trade-offs between nuclear risks and climate change risks is next to impossible – proving another characteristic of those modern risks: their ‘incommensurability’, meaning, it is impossible to ‘compare’ and weigh these risks against each other.

So what hope is there after this wake-up call about the fact that nuclear is not the silver bullet against climate change? We have to accept that climate change is real (even though we can say with little certainty how exactly it will hit us) and nuclear power is not a safe option either. We would argue that much more effort, resources and political will has to be directed toward alternative sources of energy: energy saving (by many accounts our largest resource), renewables, and lifestyle changes. If the disaster in Japan would trigger that debate there is at least a glimmer of hope coming out of this unfolding catastrophe.

Photo by IgnatiusJReillyEsq. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Europeans don’t get to heaven

Both Crane and Matten are in Europe right now. And witnessing one of the most severe disruption of airtravel since 9/11.

The closure of large parts of the European airspace has caused a lot of havoc here. Eurepean cities are full of stranded passengers and there is no train and no bus left to take them home. Even the German Chancellor or her Defense Minister had to put up with a 3 day hitchike from Lisbon and Istanbul, respectively. What a democratizing catastrophe, we are all in it together...

What is instructive about this incident is that this little volcano in small Iceland had such far reaching impacts. This place did not only start the ‘Financial Crisis’ recently, but now puts Europe out of the game. In the first chapter of our book we essentialise globalization as ‘deterritorialisation’ – and we know, its a hell of a term. But this situation makes it evident. Cheap, reliable and easy air travel has made territory irrelevant – where to relax, where to do business or where to celebrate your wedding. It can all happen wherever desired. Unless – the key driver of this globalising movement defaults. Such as airtravel (it might as well be the internet, or cars or trains, you get the picture).

But there is another edge to the case. Lufthansa, British Airways and other airlines as of yesterday have disputed the closing of the airspace. Of course, they are losing a lot of money. The closing of the airspace was based on governmental restrictions. But as it turns out, it was based on rather limited information. Just the simulations of one agency. It all amounts to the assessment of the risk. So BA and Lufthansa ran their own assessments by sending up planes into the sky.

It all points to the ethics of risk assessment. Plane crashes are considered as ‘low risk’ but ‘high impact’ catastrophes. And further, they are risks on which the individual has no influence. If the plane goes down, you have no way to influence the result. So the perceived impact of a potential air crash is much higher than, say, a road accident. This explains why governments all over Europe take these precautions, just to avoid the one air disaster that could happen if planes continued flying. As the German Transport Minister put it, defending his decisions against attacks by Lufthansa, he would never allow "the risk to passengers' life and limb to be offset against loss of revenue."

It will be interesting to see how long this view will be governing the policies of European governments. Not only the airlines loose an estimated €150m/day but supply chains are disrupted and shortages of some foods are already visible. With more palpable consequences the assessment of the necessary precautions will certainly change. After all most governments in Europe which ban flying are very happy to run nuclear power stations or other high risk technologies.

Photo by Pylon757 reproduced under the Creative Commons License.